Music in the Philippines

Since my only window into Filipino music is youtube, I’ll be cautious in making any statements about Filipino music that sound like I have any expertise whatsoever. Rather, my thoughts here represent a discovery exercise on youtube that I hope will prepare me with a few vocabulary words for my trip next month.

First, I was most interested in discovering native musical instruments from the musical heritage of the Philippians. As I searched, I found mostly native drums, lute-like string instruments, and gongs and gong-chimes. The gong-chimes I found especially interesting, as they are very similar to those that I have encountered from the Indonesian island of Bali. One of our professors here at BYU has made Balinese music a focus of his research and travel for years, and has even established a Balinese Gamelan ensemble at BYU. The Filipino gong-chimes on the video’s I found were very similar to these instruments.

The lutes are interesting to me – I’d like to find out more about their heritage. With my limited knowledge, they seem almost like a dulcimer (which originated, I believe, in the Middle East). And they seem dissimilar to the stringed instruments thatI am familiar with from the island of Bali.

But as with any county or group of people in the world, music and culture changes with time and events. In the case of the Philippines, colonization has been such a significant part of the past few centuries that even the common languages have adopted many words from their colonizers. The same is true of their music. The guitar was popularized in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, which has continued to today.

Current musical tastes are as diverse in the Philippines as they are in the rest of the world. We are currently in the middle of a globalization period in popular music, where music from various cultures is passed around and mixed together.

As examples of this, I’ll quickly review two songs we’ve discussed in class: “Manilla”, by the HotDogs, and “My Morena Girl”, by The Joe Show, a group of singers from BYU.

Manila begins with a vocal and electronic keyboard introduction, then quickly moves into a fun grove reminiscent (to me, at least) of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The horns and woodwinds are western orchestral instruments, and the drums are western versions of African instruments. The Electronic instruments could be classified as western also, but were created in a more global period of the world’s history, and so can be equally found worldwide.

            The Language in “Manila” is interesting – the verse is in Filipino, but the Chorus is mostly in English. I think that this reflects both the diversity inherent in the Phillipines and the desire of the group to reach a global audience.

“My Morena Girl” is more decidedly an American song which probably owes must of it’s musical heritage to the recent explosion of Vocal A Capella groups in American culture, especially in Utah. It provides an interesting view of some white, Mormon guys (whom I presume served LDS missions in the Philippines) using their language skills in a American Genre. They were most likely attempting to provide a connection between their culture and the culture in which they spent two years of their lives.

Music in the Philippines represents a global, diverse community, and I can’t wait to experience it first-hand. I also can’t wait to see their reactions to our presentation of European and American classical music. I hope we get to encounter as music as we are bringing!